Monday, October 13, 2014

Epidemics

I thought one of the great benefits of literacy was that you could learn from the experience of people far away or long dead. You needn't live through a tornado yourself in order to learn how to prepare for one. Of course you can probably ask a friend who has sheltered when one went by--tornadoes are fairly common.

Stock market crashes happen too, but it seemed as though we had a generation of brokers who had not seen one in their working lives, and apparently (one may infer from their advice) believed that such things were now impossible.

The Spanish Flu was about a hundred years ago, and there aren't a lot of people left we can ask about it. But we can read about epidemics and quarantines, and figure out why people did things the way they did in the past.

But if each generation considers itself sui generis, I wonder what the point of writing is.

1 comment:

Korora said...

Tn light of the First Doctor story The Dalek Invasion of Earth and the Tenth Doctor story The Stolen Earth, the much sought-after missing Second Doctor story The Power of the Daleks becomes a cautionary tale on just this theme. "I am your ser-vant," says a Dalek, and the colonists fall for it despite the Doctor's warnings and the two (at least) full-scale Dalek invasions in human history by this time. You'd think that a major plot hole, but no, it's actually believable; time and again we see similar mass blindness all around us in real life.